Civil War Photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

            The American Civil War during the 19^th century was one of the first wars to be documented in picture. Photographers faced many major constraints when they were photographing the war. Before the digital cameras or film photography was available civil war photographers had to deal with the long exposure times between each shot. This also depended on how much sun was available in order to properly expose each shot. The amount of times between each possible photo was two to five seconds which was required “to properly expose a large-format collodion on glass negative” that was typically used on the battlefield. Photographer Matthew Brady and his team of photographers though ready to photograph the first land battle of the Civil War because of the constraints of their cameras and the movements of the battle, were unable to return from the battle at Bull Run, Virginia with a single photograph.

Photographer Matthew Brady was born in 1822 in New York State. A photojournalist who decided that the war should be documented in photo though he was granted approval to document the events he would have to finance the venture on his own. Brady at had mastered daguerreotype photography which was “an early photography produced on a silver or a silver-covered copper plate” (Merriam-Webster) Later creating tinted Daguerreotype by using copper instead of silver. When Brady invited Alexander Gardner to the United States Brady switched to the wet plate process of photography which was introduced to him by Gardner. Wet Plate Process Photography also known as collodion process is “a photographic process, in common use in the mid-19th century, employing a glass photographic plate coated with iodized collodion and dipped in a silver nitrate solution immediately before use.” (dictionary.com) soon after learning this process Brady stopped using daguerreotype photography.

Matthew Brady was also well known for his photographs of American Presidents, he most well-known for his portraits that he photographed of President Abraham Lincoln as well as many of the soldiers during the Civil War such as Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. The camera that Brady used to photograph the portraits of President Lincoln was used only once since Lincoln passed away. The studio camera and the Tripod was lent to Time Magazine by the Meserve family in 1957 to photograph President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a photo similar to one that Matthew Brady had taken of President Lincoln.

There are two different aspect of Civil War photography that is notable. The first are the photographs of the subjects that showed people the true horrors of the war, such as those of the devastation of the areas subjected to the battles as well as those of fallen soldiers in the battlefields. The camera worked well with these subjects because they weren’t moving unlike the photographs that were attempted during the battles. Photographer Alexander Gardner said “It was, indeed, a ‘harvest of death”. When describing the scene of the photos taken during Gettysburg in July of 1863. Another notable type of photography of the Civil War is the hand painted portraits of the soldiers in the Union army. The photographs were commissioned in 1866, by Montgomery Meigs Quartermaster General of the United States Army to show “the army behind the army”. Meigs understood the historical value of properly recording the colors of the uniforms of the soldiers who were in the war. The branch of the army that Meigs served in specialized in distributing supplies to the army during the war one of the supplies was the clothing that would be worn by the soldiers.